A continuing trend in the health care industry is the increasing quantity of devices permanently or temporarily implanted in the human body for therapeutic and monitoring purposes. To be able to optimally perform their functions, such implantable medical devices have to be placed in a proper location and remain in that location for the duration of the treatment. Thus there is a growing need for reliable anchoring assemblies that are simple to apply with standard surgical instruments and that provide enough flexibility to cover most of the individual patient anatomies. It may be desirable to remove and/or exchange the implanted medical device with a replacement device in the same location when, for example, the original medical device malfunctions.